'Medical corridor' initiatives emerging

Friday

May 18, 2012 at 12:01 AMMay 18, 2012 at 9:17 AM

An unprecedented push to leverage Ohio's health-care assets is coalescing around three concepts: a forum for entrepreneurs to pitch Ohio-developed medical products; a statewide collaboration on clinical trials; and shared data storage for medical imaging and genomics.

Ben Sutherly, The Columbus Dispatch

An unprecedented push to leverage Ohio’s health-care assets is coalescing around three concepts: a forum for entrepreneurs to pitch Ohio-developed medical products; a statewide collaboration on clinical trials; and shared data storage for medical imaging and genomics.

Industry officials discussed those initiatives yesterday as part of Gov. John Kasich’s vision for a statewide medical corridor. They had met in private on Wednesday.

By September, officials hope to have in place a “Choose Ohio” forum at which Ohio medical-device manufacturers can pitch new products to medical institutions, said Baiju Shah, president and CEO of BioEnterprise in Cleveland, which works with institutions to form businesses and commercialize bioscience technologies. Those products would be vetted before the presentations, he said. Officials hope six products will be presented to a panel of medical institutions each quarter, but the frequency of those forums will hinge on demand, Shah said.

“If we can assist them by giving them the platform to present … I think we’ll attract entrepreneurs from other parts of the country here to set up their businesses,” Shah said.

The state also is home to three centers designated by the National Institutes of Health for clinical research: Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Cincinnati. Medical-school officials are interested in launching a statewide clinical-trials platform that could give patients quicker access to innovative treatments and give Ohio an advantage in attracting clinical studies, Shah said.

One way the three institutions might work together is creating a common institutional-review-board approval process, said Dr. Steven Gabbe, CEO of the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University.

The schools have complementary strengths, and areas of collaboration could include research into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, Gabbe said.

Another idea still under analysis is to create shared storage for medical imaging and genomics data. It wasn’t clear whether such a shared system would be managed by a nonprofit or a for-profit entity, Shah said.

Officials on Wednesday also heard an update on a pediatric research collaborative focusing on asthma and babies born with addiction. The state has given $2 million toward that research.